History
Mole
Hello! And welcome to History, as explored by the world’s scariest
mole – ME!
D’you see all those fleshy protuberances on my face? ( I think you
should do. Possessing eyes and the ability to use them. You have little excuse.
)
Well, I’m a star-nosed mole, and I use those to snuffle out
juicy titbits from the topsoil of society’s past – just for YOU.
So think of these forthcoming morsels as pale wriggling woodlice
of truth shivering in the light of your fresh glow as you unearth the
protective covering of time.
Or as blind twisting worms of fact plucked from the deciduous
mulch of the past.
Or maybe just as words. Who really knows.
( I mean, really. Really really REALLY really. Really? )
Anyway. A
full-serving of tasty History Mole facts, coming up…
For
more History Mole Facts, click HERE.
The measurement of a yard was instituted by
Henry I, who decided it should be the distance from the end of his nose to his
thumb.
Could thing I’ve never tried to set up a new
scale of measurement, eh?
In the 18th Century, a French child could
be burnt at the stake for making fun of a priest.
And there’s a moral in that one somewhere.
Just like there’s a ‘mole’ on this page somewhere.
( Ho-ho, just a little bit of mole-humour
there for you...)
Frederick William I of Prussia, who ruled
in the early 18th Century, had a cruel sense of humour - once he and his friend
( Prince Leopold of Anhalt Dessau ) cut off the tails of all the cows in a
field as a ‘little joke’ on the farmer.
Any information on what they did with them
has proved inaccessible - even to my 22 fleshy projections. ( By next issue can
I be calling them ‘rays’? it sounds so much more comfortable... )
In 1667, Louis XIV went campaigning in
Flanders. The royal coach contained his wife the queen, his pregnant mistress
Louise de la Valieres ( who was rapidly losing the King’s favour ) and his new
mistress Mme de Montespan ( who was
rapidly gaining it ). The heat was suffocating, the roads atrocious, and the
coach only stopped if Louis needed the toilet.
Reminds me of one of our family visits to see
Uncle Cedric...
Frankfurter sausages were first created
in China.
I couldn’t
find out what with, mind.
The first set of traffic-lights ever
erected was outside the Houses of Parliament. They blew up on 2 January 1869,
killing the policeman who operated them.
Sad sad
affair. Not even amusing to moles, in any way at all. No. Absolutely not.
We moles
don’t have much need for traffic lights - maybe because once a mole face like
mine has come your way, you’re quite
likely to reverse. But then, we can sense each other coming anyway. Maybe people would be better drivers then if they
were blind like us then. Or maybe, better still, moles could just chauffeur
people about. And we wouldn’t need traffic lights on the road. So no nice
police men would be exploded.
George Washington, the first president of
the USA, carried a portable sundial to tell him the time.
My Uncle
Arthur used to do that. Never quite got the hang of the thing. Being a mole and
all.
Napoleon was afraid of cats.
So am I
mate, so am I.
During the reign of Elizabeth I, there was
a tax on men’s beards.
And thus
creating an opportunity for the 16th Century equivalent of the Fashion
Police to be created to collect the
money.
I wonder why
she did that; a beard hate campaign ? Maybe someone started the rumour that she
didn’t just have the heart & soul of a man, but also the facial hair...
Though they would probably then be for the chop. Which brings us onto...
Leopold II - who later became ruler of the
Hapsburg Empire during the late 18th Century - when governing Tuscany between
1765-90, abolished the use of torture, and had the instruments of torture
displayed in a museum.
Tubas,
clarinets and recorders mostly. BOOM BOOM !
It was customary in 17th Century France, to
remove your hat when in the presence of Louis XIV’s dining table, whether he
was there or no.
Hmm. It would appear that headwear is
offensive to large slabs of tree. Never noticed it myself. Though I do tend to
lose most of my hats. Still, I’m sure they go on to a better life.
A flock of starlings perched on the minute
hand of Big Ben one day in 1945, and slowed the clock by 5 minutes.
That’s a
lorra lorra birds. I suppose they’d slow anybody down though. I remember when
old ‘Dirty Harry’ from down the field tried to rob the Jackdaws in the oak tree
- they all sat on him until the old Bill ( Well, the heron from Barker’s Pond
actually ) came and took him away. And he most definitely had been going
nowhere very fast, what with all those birds sitting on him.
( It’s just
struck me that if I wasn’t looking at those words with an animal point of view,
I might find that idea deeply appealing. Sorry. )
More English knights were killed by
lightning during a thunderstorm in 1360 than were killed at the battles of
Crecy and Poitiers.
Bummer.
Now then, I myself have been struck by
lightning previously. I know now that just before such an event, your hair will
stand on end. Indeed. And also I have learned that it is advisable that, if you
are going to be out & about in a thunderstorm, you ought not to follow the knights’ examples and wear
tin-cans. Or my example, and shelter in one. Ouch...
Admiral Nelson suffered from seasickness.
Now this piece of information is, I believe,
right up there with the existence of ‘flightless birds’.
Since 1959 over 6000 pieces of debris from
man’s exploration of space have fallen out of orbit, many of them hitting the
earth.
Makes you
think, doesn’t it.
Of course,
if one of them hits you, you won’t be thinking for much longer though.
Solar energy was used to power toys in
1615.
I couldn’t find any more information on this
however, just that it happened.
I can tell
you though that solar energy has been long known of in mole circles - one of
our myths tells of how one Great Leader defeated the Hound from Hell using that
very science... By the careful positioning of a magnifying glass in the midday
sun, just out of one of the palatial underground entrances, the beast felt the
full force of the burning solar power.
However, the
energy which the animal then created by rapid motion was not harnessed.
In 1913 an American named James Franklin
King invented a waterproof bag in which someone could have a bath standing up.
And you just
start thinking - WHY ?
The wife of the Roman Emperor Nero kept 500
asses so that she always had a supply of milk to bathe in.
I once tried
this - not with 500 donkeys you understand, more one amenable cow, and I don’t
see why a person would ever want to. Have you ever spilt milk on the carpet,
and known that unless you get down there and scrub immediately, you’ll be forever plagued by the smell as it dries
and curdles... My coat has never been the same since.
Queen Victoria never permitted the royal
train to travel faster than 48 km ( 30 miles ) per hour.
It must be remembered in looking at that
statement that, at times in history, the word ‘train’ means some kind of
procession. Though, as a dyslexic / literal director of Shakespearean plays, I
always thought how much FUN it would be if, say in ‘The Merchant Of Venice’,
Portia had come onstage in a train.
I try to explain this sort of idea to the
other moles round our way, but they don’t seem to understand. I really think
that it must be, like so many other things which happen here, completely over
their heads.
( Oh-ho, and
you’ll have thought I’ll have lost my sense of mole humour over the summer... )
The Roman Emperor Nero used to eat leeks to
try to improve his singing voice.
Whatever
floats your boat I suppose. Though I thought, as a result of spending too much
of my time burrowing under noisy children’s playgrounds when they were telling appalling
culturally-specific jokes, that you couldn’t buy leeks out of Wales.
In 1626, Peter Minuit paid 60 guilders (
worth $ 24 ) for Manhattan to a group of Indians who did not actually come from
that area at all.
Did people say ‘bugger’ a lot then ? ( Oh, I
do hope you didn’t misread that comment. Whether they said ‘bugger a lot’ is
highly irrelevant...)
In 1820 a man sold his wife in the
Canterbury cattle market for five shillings. ( 25p )
I know for
certain they had the word ‘bastard’ by this point though.
Frederick William I of Prussia made his
wife do the family’s washing up. And the sweeping up.
You see, it can be tough at the top. As a
mole, I know that. If I go up to the surface, I keep getting trodden on.
Though, as I am a chirpy little chappy, having my head ground into the dirt
repeatedly just means that I can find out some more history facts for you. And
always beat the other moles round my way at rugby.
Once, when Mme de Maintenon ( Louis’ last
mistress ) complained of the cold in the perfectly designed palace of
Versailles, the King replied: ‘Well, at least we shall all die symmetrically.’
Now I’m a mole, and I find that funny.
In the town of Waterloo in Belgium there is
a tomb for an English soldier’s leg.
I don’t think
any of my body parts would be given an honourable burial if they were separated
from their original owner. I wonder where the rest of him was. Maybe they
didn’t have room for any more. I remember when I was younger, fighting with my
horrible younger sister over who should have our mole-doll, and we split it in
half. She buried her side, and I, ahem, made mine into a catapult...
Where was I?
In an English witch trial of the late 17th
Century, Lord Chief Justice Powell acquitted the accused because there was not,
he reasoned, any law against flying.
Jolly sound fellow, in my opinion. Not like
those fools who’d test to see whether a woman was a witch by drowning her - if
she died, she wasn’t; if she lived, she was burned. Now then, one of my friends
is called Blind Justice, but that’s just cos he’s a lawyer mole - it doesn’t
reflect on his practising of the bar you know...
The ruler of Brandenburg-Prussia in the
1660’s forbade his subjects’ wearing of clogs.
To promote the leather industry mind, not
because he was offended by persons wearing a small kayak on each foot. And
where do I stand on this debate ? Well I personally am offended whether I’m
stepped on by either a cow or a clog-wearer, both tend to be fairly clumsy.
Though if a clog falls down one of my holes I am able to make something useful
out of it.
When the French military leader Tallard was
captured at the Battle of Blenheim ( 13 August 1704 ), he was taken to England
and imprisoned in Nottingham. There he endeared himself to the local gentry by
introducing them to celery.
One can imagine the conversations - ‘Je te
voudrais you be meeting mon petit-amie celery...’
Hmm. But
seriously folks, how did he have a chance to introduce celery to the English ?
Surely when he was captured they didn’t allow him to just nip back home for
some cuttings from his allotment... Which means that Tallard must have gone
into battle with celery close to hand. Which beggars the question - WHY
?????????
And that’s nearly all we have time for.
( What am I
saying? There’s only me here. )
Start again
- that’s nearly all that I have time for. Though just because I do this on my
own doesn’t mean that I am in any way lonely. I choose a solitary life you
know. Choose it. Quite happily.
And before I
head back to my happy and fulfilling mostly solitary life, I would like to
leave you with the following gems:
In
his Rag Week at Swansea University,
Richey
Manic painted himself white and dressed up as a sperm.
Mogwai
once started to breakdance while watching a Urusei Yatsura set in Chelmsford.
Tycho
Brabe, the famous Sixteenth Century Dutch astronomer,
wore a
false nose made of gold and silver.
Last revised: 14/08/01